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I took this video with a Flip-cam back in Alllston, MA in March, 2009. I just found it on my hard drive and thought others might like it. It’s low-fi, but a lot of fun. (I would pay quite a bit of money for a handy camera that actually had good sound pick-ups – makes up for poor video quality.)
The band is Thousands of One. My brother is the drummer and they are based out of Ithaca, NY.
From this fun David Carson TED talk on design.
The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostered ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property. — Unknown
Another great example of how technology often changes how we exchange information. Fun talk, worth watching.
David Carson was also interviewed in Helvetica. It’s a movie worth watching if you haven’t seen it yet.
Since Terry Tate has this awesome video which is making the rounds:
I thought I would collect some of my favorites from the past:
I’m re-posting this from Gen because it’s worth watching. Yes, it’s long, but Paul Krugman is funny and some of his words are creepily prescient.
In case you don’t know who James Howard Kunstler is, allow me introduce you. Mr. Kunstler is a very interesting man. I’ve been casually reading his stuff for the better part of a decade. And he’s notoriously cranky. Bruce Sterling included something that he wrote in a post on wired that includes some pretty awesome stuff:
Some big questions for the week: will the Euro survive as a currency? Will the rush into the U.S. dollar continue even as the U.S. financial system dematerializes in a Fibonacci fever of accelerating de-leveraged infinitude? Will the remaining Big Boyz, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan succumb to the counter-party hemorrhagic fever? Will great rows of lesser banking dominoes now start clacking onto their faces? Will all fifty states follow the leads of California and Massachusetts and line up at the U.S. Treasury’s hand-out window. Will the entity that calls itself the civilized world be left at week’s end with anything resembling money?
I’m certainly don’t believe all that Mr. Kunstler says, but I always enjoy the way he says it.
And now, because you’ve been so patient, here’s Mr. Kunstler talking at TED a few years ago. Some really great commentary on the American landscape. And it’s really funny.
Note: his first book, The Geography of Nowhere is actually a really wonderful read. He wasn’t quite as cranky back then.
After years and years of having the default theme for my weblog I finally went out and found a theme.
I’ve been browsing around for a few days now, not really happy with of the ones I came across but I finally found one I really like. It’s the Tarski theme. It’s reasonably configurable, seems to work pretty well with most of my plugins (reCAPTCHA required some minor changes) and I’m overall pretty happy with it how it looks and feels. Great job, guys!
Joi Ito has a link to something he built called a flowgram [tiny link]. What’s a flowgram? It lets you tell a story while a series of photos and web pages are shown to demonstrate what you’re talking about. I’m so used to static presentations that when I was first using it I thought that the web pages were just screen shots but when I moused over them I discovered they were live. I was surprised at how well-programmed I am to have certain expectations about how a presentation should work. You can also pause the audio and the story, browse around for a bit, and then return to the story.
It’s great to see storytelling mixed with the live web. A very neat idea and can really reset expectations about what presentations could and should be. I’ve already professed my love for visual storytelling and this is right up my alley.
(And I’m sad that a lot of it is written in flash, but don’t worry – audio and video are coming to a browser near you.)
The entire episode is full of awesome. Go watch it. His feeds are pretty awesome, too. (Thanks go to Jonathan Zittrain who set up the moment.)
The ever wonderful John Resig finally posted his totally awesome processing.js code to the web. If you haven’t seen it, you should go take a look. The Wired Compiler blog said “…this might be the most impressive thing we’ve ever seen.” And I agree, but probably not for the same reasons that they cite.
For a long time we’ve seen a niche on the web being filled by proprietary solutions. So-called rich internet graphics have long been the domain of Flash, before that Java (with limited success), ActiveX and now Microsoft is trying to jam Silverlight onto the world. However, each of these technologies suffers from one fatal flaw: they are, as a friend often described, deeply opaque. If you’re a developer for one of these technologies you’re on your own. You have to engage in a huge amount of training, the tools are often expensive or are difficult to use and then you are locked into a very specific platform. The bar for entry as a creator is very high. I think that Brendan would not mind me using his words to describe these technologies: Ivory Towers.
But the web is different. I’ve recently taken to describe the web as the world’s largest open source project because of its inherent transparency. Someone else doing something really interesting? Take a look at the source and copy it. Improve on it. Share it with others. As a developer for the web you aren’t alone. You have the work of thousands of others to draw upon. And the bar for entry is still about as low as you can get: a text editor. The web is smothered with information on how to develop for the web from the simplest HTML to advanced AJAX including everything from the front end to back end server work. It’s a highly democratized process, one that anyone can invest in and learn with no barriers for entry.
So back to processing.js. What John has done (in his spare time!) is to start to expose the capabilities of what we’ve been slowly adding to the platform of the web and give people a way to start to explore what we can really do. Canvas is here and it works. Video and audio have already landed in a couple of other browsers and we’ll have it soon enough. And each of them is exposed in the lingua franca of the web: transparent declarative markup connected by simple interactive scripts that are distributed as source.
We’re already starting to see the results. John released his code on Thursday. By Friday, someone had already duplicated the processing.js environment as a XUL program and someone else already created an editor where you can try out processing scripts directly on the web. That’s in one day after the code was posted on the web.
Just imagine for a second if those sites let people share and display neat little graphical widgets with source where people can try out different objects and learn from each other’s source code. Easy to drop in graphical interactive elements into other sites with the same transparency and zero-barrier to learning we’ve seen from the rest of the web. Think about how fast that stuff might spread on the web, how we might end up with people sharing and learning together and how much better the experience on the web might be in the end. That iterative process is one that needs starting points and what John has done is give us a great starting point.
So the world is changing. And changing quickly. The web is going to win, filling the market niche where Flash and other similar technologies found their hold. And John’s little project can hopefully act as a great catalyst to take us there. Thanks, John!
interesting stuff